Self-Supervised Pretraining for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
This work addresses the problem of reducing data annotation costs for researchers and practitioners in computer vision, though it is incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised and fusion techniques.
The paper tackles the need for expensive ImageNet pretraining in RGB-D salient object detection by proposing self-supervised pretext tasks and a consistency-difference aggregation module, achieving competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods on six benchmark datasets.
Existing CNNs-Based RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) networks are all required to be pretrained on the ImageNet to learn the hierarchy features which helps provide a good initialization. However, the collection and annotation of large-scale datasets are time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we utilize self-supervised representation learning (SSL) to design two pretext tasks: the cross-modal auto-encoder and the depth-contour estimation. Our pretext tasks require only a few and unlabeled RGB-D datasets to perform pretraining, which makes the network capture rich semantic contexts and reduce the gap between two modalities, thereby providing an effective initialization for the downstream task. In addition, for the inherent problem of cross-modal fusion in RGB-D SOD, we propose a consistency-difference aggregation (CDA) module that splits a single feature fusion into multi-path fusion to achieve an adequate perception of consistent and differential information. The CDA module is general and suitable for cross-modal and cross-level feature fusion. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show that our self-supervised pretrained model performs favorably against most state-of-the-art methods pretrained on ImageNet. The source code will be publicly available at \textcolor{red}{\url{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/SSLSOD}}.